Author Rawi Hage. (Milosz Rowickj/House of Anansi Press)

One of the central plot strands in Rawi Hage’s new novel, Cockroach, involves the weekly meetings between the book’s unnamed protagonist and Genevieve, his therapist. Genevieve was assigned to help him after his release from a psychiatric-care facility following a suicide attempt. While reluctant to share his feelings with a stranger, the narrator is mindful of the therapist’s power to return him to the hospital. To capture Genevieve’s attention, the narrator starts telling her, in piecemeal form, about a past plot to seek revenge on his vicious brother-in-law in Beirut. Only after several sessions does the narrator reveal whether he actually succeeded in killing the man.

"I don’t advocate violence, but it’s something we have to explore. It’s part of our society."— Rawi Hage

On one level, these therapy sessions echo One Thousand and One Nights. This famous collection of medieval stories from Arabia, India and Persia is framed by the story of Scheherazade, the new bride of a Persian king named Shahryar. After his first wife’s infidelity, Shahryar marries a succession of virgins whom he beheads after their wedding night. When Scheherazade becomes the Shahryar’s newest bride, she manages to stave off death by telling the king a series of overlapping stories over consecutive nights. The king ultimately spares Scheherazade and the story ends happily ever after.

“In a way, Genevieve is the king and the narrator is Scheherazade,” says Hage over the phone from Montreal in a low, soft mumble. His manner is friendly, if cautious. “[The narrator] is reluctant. He doesn’t want to be there. But he doesn’t want to go back to the hospital. He’s a good storyteller, and stories can save your life sometimes.”

Stories haven’t necessarily saved Hage’s life, but they’ve been exceptionally rewarding. Hage was trained as a photo artist and worked as a cab driver. In 2006, he emerged from complete obscurity with DeNiro’s Game, a debut novel that would appear on the shortlist for Canada’s two biggest book prizes, the Giller and the Governor General’s Literary Award; it also became a bestseller. DeNiro’s Game is the story of two young men growing up in war-stricken Lebanon and this past June, it earned the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, an international prize that comes with a 100,000-Euro cheque.

(House of Anansi Press)

Before I spoke to Hage, his publisher warned me that he was reluctant to discuss either his biography or the IMPAC win. “I wonder sometimes if my story is more interesting than my writing,” jokes Hage, who emigrated from Beirut to New York City in the early 1980s to distance himself from the Lebanese civil war, before moving to Montreal almost a decade later. “I did surpass many obstacles; it makes a great story, of course. But at some point, I realized [many profiles] were more context than content. I think I can now claim to be known as a writer of literature first and foremost.”

Morally complicated and intellectually engaged, Cockroach can easily stand on the merits of its content alone. As with DeNiro’s Game, there’s some biographical overlap between Hage and the narrator of Cockroach, but the literary allusions and fabulist touches in the new book mark it unmistakeably as fiction. Cockroach is set in Montreal and follows its desperate, impoverished, Lebanese-born narrator as he wanders from his therapy sessions back to the city’s Middle Eastern immigrant community. A thief from an early age, he imagines transforming into a cockroach as he pays unannounced visits to the homes of his friends and acquaintances. Hage says he liked the image of the cockroach, a lowly yet resilient creature, “because it’s the closest thing to the earth. It’s the closest thing to the underground. Somehow, it enters people’s places with ease. It’s functional and metaphoric at the same time.” Reviewers have cited Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an influence, but Hage refutes it. “Kafka was no influence,” he says. He suggests that the fabulist stories of Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol had a hand in his writing. “If anything, the cockroach in Kafka is immobilized.”

As in DeNiro’s Game, violence plays a central role in Cockroach. While the narrator’s story of revenge comes out in therapy, an opportunity for payback emerges for another character, Shoreh, an Iranian woman who was tortured and raped at the hands of an Iranian official. But Hage passes no moral judgment on his vengeful cast.

“I don’t advocate violence, but it’s something we have to explore,” he explains. “It’s part of our society, but just exploring violence doesn’t mean I’m subscribing to it. Description is not prescription.” He adds: “There’s a lot of literature dealing with non-violence. But this non-violence is always advocated by people who are victims. You never ask non-violence from people in power. I find it ironic.”

(House of Anansi Press)

Another primary theme in the book is the idea of madness. As in the classic novel Hunger (1890) by Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun — another author Hage admires — the narrator’s delusions and anti-social behaviour aren’t part of an illness, but rather a symptom of a larger mental-health problem afflicting society. “We’re living in mad times,” says Hage. “There’s this collision of civilizations that live side by side. And I can’t believe religion is coming back.”

Raised a Christian but now an atheist, Hage regards all religions with scepticism. “If anything, this book is about secularism; it’s a clear attack on organized religion. Maybe because I lived through a religious war, but I saw how religion can be destructive and how irrational it can make people. Having said that, I’m not on a mission in my writing, but these are my own beliefs.”

Hage’s look at the underbelly of organized religion and immigrant life in Canada is unflinching and grim; what’s even more remarkable is that he has transformed that material into a page-turner. Cockroach’s finely wrought scenes build in tension toward a conclusion that’s fitting and yet unpredictable. It might be going too far to label Hage the Scheherazade of CanLit, but readers are bound to be seduced.

Cockroach will be published by House of Anansi Press on Aug. 30.

Kevin Chong is a writer based in Vancouver.